Emergency declared in Canadian oil-sands town ravaged by wildfire

May 5, 2016 10:01 AM

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As night turned to day, and day into night again, the air in Fort McMurray, Alberta, remained thick with smoke. After a massive wildfire that has been raging since the weekend prompted a mandatory evacuation of the 80,000-resident Canadian city, the province of Alberta declared a state of emergency on Wednesday.

“It is a possibility that we may lose a large portion of the town,” Scott Long, an official with Alberta’s emergency management agency, told Reuters.